Mulgrave River Periperipo

Periperipo

Periperipo: the Mulgrave River word for the bullroarer. Birr-Birrah, recorded with a Freshwater blade, is the same word, and Yidiny has a second word for it, milbirri.

Periperipo is the Mulgrave River name for the whirled blade, the word the coastal Gungganyji dialect of Yidiny records as birrbubirrbu, "bull-roarer." This one is a long oval of wood with slightly convex sides, painted red and black and pierced at one end for its cord; W. Charles Handley collected it in the Mulgrave country near Cairns, and the museum bought it in 1900 from the dealers Rollin & Feuardent. A larger companion from the same lot, also red and black, hung in the Museum of Mankind's 1972–82 exhibition "The Aborigines of Australia." Three more from Freshwater, on the northern edge of Cairns, are in the Pitt Rivers Museum, bought in 1936 from the dealer A. W. F. Fuller: the smallest carries its own recorded name, Birr-Birrah, and the museum's register titles all three simply "secret-sacred object."

Mulgrave blacks. Periperipo or bull roarer

British Museum register, object Oc1900,0723.46

Particulars

Object

Long oval wooden blade, painted red and black and pierced at one end for its cord. Another blade under the same name, peri peri po, reached the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, from the country inland from Cairns in 1900: thirty-four centimetres of carved wood, five and a half wide, stained and pierced for its cord.

Function

Not recorded.